I find this move concerning, and wish that the Founder had looked for a new CEO that shared his values rather than a Private Equity and Mergers Expert.
Furthermore, the change to the GRIT motto is worrying. Trust is useless without Transparency when it comes to code and security.
Self hosting is the new battefront for the individual’s right to sovereign data
I swear, equity is literaly just pure evil, allowed to thrive only due to lack of force opposing it.
“Equity” or “Capital” = the kiss of death
Great I bought a paid subscription for it all this time for it to end up like this, I’m done with anything that is not self hosted now on, I’ll just convert my old laptop into a home server
This. At this rate everything that has growth and not open source is just a resource to exploit.
The company has long defined its values with the acronym “GRIT,” which used to stand for “Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion, and Transparency.” After May 4, it changed the acronym to stand for “Gratitude, Responsibility, Innovation, and Trust.”
It’s not as bad as the headline seems. Transparency is still in the motto. The actual change is:
But still. Why change it at all? Why replace “inclusion” with “innovation”?
It smells like Tech Bro.
There’s just no way to spin that positively, even giving them the benefit of the doubt, especially since they aren’t rolling it back. Someone spent effort to make that values change, so its not an accident nor a “nothingburger”.
I don’t need my password manager to innovate anything. I would very much like it to include support for all of my tools and machines though.
It’s the change from “users” and “community members” to “customers” for me.
Removing ‘inclusion’ smells like a pivot to the right, same way DEI is a target for maga
Well, trust is literally the oposite of transparency. So i would call it quite bad, especially if you consider that right now i trust these guys with my credit card details, my taxID, all my passwords.
Exactly. In cybersec, trust is someting you try to avoid or at least minimize. Trying to use it as a selling point is ridiculous.
Or it’s something you earn through transparency.
That’s what they are trying to communicate here, yes. But 8.5 million users didn’t need to be told they need to trust the platform, they chose to. As did I with a premium plan to cover MFA and attachments.
Now with business types in charge and a hidden doubling of the fees, that’s more than halfway out the window no matter what the website stands for. I’m guessing somebody decided it’s time to cash in on the goodwill they built over the past decade.
That’s a great point.
I don’t want to trust them either. I don’t want to have to.
The only “devil’s advocate” argument I can think of is they’re trying to appeal to enterprise clients (who would not know that and want to “trust” a security company). That would explain the “I” change: “inclusion” (sadly) sounds political, “innovation” is like corporate catnip. Bitwarden could be trying to attract big fish to fund development, having their cake an eating it.
Ty. So many comments here didn’t see your post and others did but didn’t read it. My take is innovation is a greater priority, and trust protocols. I’ll watch but I’ll wait for it to be a something burger.
Because the “inclusive” part is already described by the first letter’s “story”?
I guess I won’t be recommending Botwarden to normies anymore.
Great. Now I have to move all of my password to another services because of a stupid decision made by a company.
I guess it’s time to move to vaultwarden sooner rather than later… This wasn’t supposed to be the weekend project, but fuck it; let’s roll with it!
My question is move to vaultwarden, and trust they will still develop the open source client apps, or just preemptively move to another system. The UX isnt perfect, but it seems a lot easier to use than kerpassxc. Time to do some research.
Very easy to migrate to vaultwarden from bitwarden I think, so I’d probably do that and hope the clients are forked if ever needed. I’d probably just live with vaultwardens web ui before swapping completely to keepassxc (because setting up keepass db sync to all devices manually doesn’t sound fun).
No personally using KeePass, but I’ve heard Syncthing is great to sync the database. Might wanna try to look into that.
How good or bad is a move to Proton Pass?
Ah for fuck’s sake. Seems like every month I have to change something because some fucking company starts getting a taste for greed via data sucking. I’m goddamn sick of it.
That’s why you use open source alternatives everywhere :) just replace one at a time when the company fails
Enshitification
Start using open source then
Unprompted snark from an .ml user, how surprising. I am a bigger cheerleader for open source than any of my friends or family. It’s the only real path to stay free of corporate influence, greed, and spying (in regards to software). Live free or die.
Bitwarden is, by definition, open source. It has been since I started using it ~6 years ago. I’m tired of literally everything having the potential for enshittification. Nothing is safe in the long run, not even volunteer-run projects. If you think your favorite project is safe because of some “core ethos” or “guiding principles”, you’re just drinking the kool-aid. As long as we exist under capitalism, anything under the sun can be enshittified.
I will never give up, even if things seem even more dire than they are now. But I’m tired of having to maintain constant vigilance.
Troll better.
why even have “Motto” if you are just going to renege on it.
In this case, not having a motto would have made them able to get further down the enshittification path before anyone noticed. They just warned us.
though this also points out why such things as companies having “values” is laughable and should be ridiculed if they arent clearly enforced. All they do is scam people into thinking they might not be explitative shits which shouldnt be allowed or looked kindly upon.
So many people have to switch services now and even more will just become victims of the company after it becomes more shitty. All those people could have used some other service that is less likely to go shitty, which in turn would have given it more resources to improve.
Luckily BW is open source, and VaultWarden exists. If they enshitify, all it takes is a fork of the browser extensions and apps with a rebrand.
This right here is the only answer
Companies can try to steal the app but they can only steal the name
Exactly, IMO Vaultwarden should just fork the clients and extensions and officially take the lead. Bitwarden can just go the way of OpenOffice for all I care.
I’m out of the loop, what happened to OpenOffice?
OpenOffice was maintained by sun Microsystems and they were bought by oricale. At the time it was seen so negatively that a fork called libreoffice was created and almost immediately became the default office suite for most people who were using OpenOffice.
Yeah, this here is exactly the reason why anytime I have to migrate from any piece of software I’m migrating to something open source and standards compliant.
Short-term, yes. Maintaining the client integrations is a ton of work. If BW ever breaks selfhosted integrations, it’s gonna be a shitshow.
How would network hosting work, though? Like… do I need to pull my passwords down now?
You can export from any of the BW clients. Then import into sepf-hosted BW or VW.
Update: After publication, an employee on the Bitwarden subreddit said that “Always free” had been restored on its pricing page, calling it an “oversight” by the marketing team. The product page for Bitwarden’s personal password manager remains unchanged.
Oversight
They got community checked and backtracked hard… I have always endorsed bitwarden but that is becoming worrisome. :(
Yeah, you know those marketing team people. They totally went out of their way to make more work for themselves to change it with I’m sure zero instructions from higher up to do so.
Getting hard to endorse anyone you don’t personally know at this point.
We’re sorry we got caught
Why the fuck does everything that’s good turn to shit? This world sucks. This timeline sucks.
it’s all motivated by the accumulation of wealth = capitalism
Accumulation of power is a common motive regardless of political system. Money is just one way power gets expressed.
Not claiming our system is perfect by any means. But this thought, to me, always felt like kicking the can down the road.
I think there’s a difference though, in that capitalism rewards this kind of innate motive, while socialism doesn’t, so I think it would be much easier to build a system based on that that’s not fucked from the foundations like capitalism is. The societal benefits of capitalism always feel like an accidental side effect at most, when it should be at a heart of any economy system.
Also it definitely seems that holding power over others warps the human mind, so I would definitely advocate for distributing policy-making power as evenly across the population as possible.
Kicking the can down the road implies you have a better solution?
A solution that stops evil people from being greedy for all of future society, gaming whatever our system is to hoard resources? No, I don’t.
Whether under capitalism or socialism, either system would need frequent attention and intervention by thoughtful, socially responsible people to watch for abusers of the system.
Right, but Capitalism incentivises this behaviour, thus making the checks and balances required both more robust and needing to be applied for regularly - while the powerful are capable of preventing this.
On the other hand, Socialism has incentives that are completely different - managing the abusers would be a much simpler task.
That might qualify as an argument but the enshittification of everything hasn’t gained anyone power, only money. Cuba was curing cancer before we started more war crimes in order to prove socialism doesn’t work, while we’re financing fast food.
VC ruins everything
This is literally a product where a hobbyist tried to fix a niche, and now the VCs arrive.
It’s not a timeline. It’s just the world we keep making. The only one.
If things turn for the worse, hopefully Vaultwarden can fork the client as well
